E-mail, or electronic mail, is widely used for communicating personal or commercial information. E-mail systems generally comprise an e-mail host that has an associated set of e-mail clients. The e-mail host is typically connected to a wider network for receiving messages from other networks. Most often, the e-mail system uses a TCP/IP network, such as the Internet, for managing and transmitting e-mail messages. An e-mail message typically has header information and a body section. Often, a data file is attached to the e-mail. The header information typically includes addressing information, routing information, and information related to the size and content of the body and any attachments. The header information typically has no more than a few hundred bytes of information, while the body may contain hundreds to thousands of bytes of information. Most often, larger files are sent as attachments to the e-mail. With the proliferation of multimedia applications, these attachment files may be very large. For example, image and video files may be several megabytes in size.
When sending an e-mail message to a particular recipient, the e-mail originates from a sender, and enters the e-mail system through that sender's e-mail host. Through a series of store and forward network servers, the e-mail message is directed to the e-mail host server for the intended recipient. The e-mail message is held at the recipient's e-mail host server until the e-mail recipient's client connects to the e-mail host. Upon connection, the e-mail message is typically downloaded to the e-mail client. In some cases, the user of the e-mail client may specify that only limited information should be downloaded upon connection. For example, some host applications enable the host to be configured to send only header information upon connection. In this way, header information may be downloaded to the e-mail client, and the user may review the header information to select particular e-mails to fully download. This is particularly important when the user accesses the e-mail host through a relatively slow or unreliable connection. With such a slow or unreliable connection, a large attachment file may take several minutes or even hours to download. Rather than download such a large attachment using a slow connection, a user may prefer to move to a device with a faster connection, and download the attachment more efficiently at a later time.
Many users today have multiple devices for accessing their e-mail host account. Some of these devices may operate very fast, such as an office computer connected to a DSL or broadband connection. Other devices, such as portable computers or wireless handsets, may connect at much slower speeds. Some devices may even connect at different speeds depending upon network condition or geographic location. For example, some wireless service providers enable high data rate connections in certain geographic locations, but then revert to slower connection speeds under high demand conditions, or when the user moves out of the enhanced service area. In this way, the user may not be able to predict connection speed for a particular device. Also, the e-mail host may have a default download configuration for one type of device, and when a user connects with a slower device, finds that the slow connection is overwhelmed with large message downloads. Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for more effectively managing the download of e-mail messages.